By now it is clear as day that digitization creates a pre-informed customer who has altered requests on assistance and support. This demands a new lead management, whose role is to capture, qualify, and guide potential customers who have shown their interest in the brand, before they are handed over to sales as a hot lead or bow out of the buying process. Besides systematics, this has a lot to do with communication, as you can imagine.

Irdeto has launched its annual predictions report, looking at the content delivery and security trends in media and entertainment for 2018. The new e-book, Disruptive Technologies, Consolidation and Cybersecurity: 2018 Trends in the Connected World, features commentary on topics including the continuing battle against piracy, innovation in IP video and 4K UHD, growing competition from OTT for both rights and viewers, Android TV, Artificial Intelligence potential, or watermarking becoming mandated by content owners.

Although the AI development is still in its infancy, it’s clear by now that customer satisfaction can be achieved faster than ever with its help. However, like with any new technology, the typical principles apply: First, AI remained a marginal phenomenon and only experts dealt with it, but after it got some media attention it became the talk of the town. Then, with the first success stories, a hype develops that unfortunately attracts charlatans as well. High user expectations often result in disappointing practice experience, though.

According to Getty Images’ 2018 Visual Trends predictions, brands and the media will redefine modern masculinity this year. The expert in visual communications identified ‘Masculinity Undone’, ‘Second Renaissance’ and ‘Conceptual Realism’ as the trends society will be most responsive to this year.

It’s Friday night. The city’s finest restaurant is bathed in candlelight, while a couple clinks to ten years and sips on overpriced champagne. This evening was long awaited; the prospect of some adult conversation was worth the logistical gymnastics required to get the kids babysat. One partner looks into the other’s eyes, lingers lovingly over the pregnant pause and then launches the opening statement as planned: “Honey, thanks for joining me for your annual performance review. I’ve been looking forward to examining how you’ve gone over the past 12 months.”

If mobile app developers in the early days focused mostly on winning new users to succeed internationally, rethinking kicked in by now, since intrusive mobile advertising is unacceptable nowadays! This paved the way for native ads, which possess the characteristics of being effective and at the same time less intrusive to users.

China's Singles' Day has grown beyond a Chinese online sales campaign into an international, omni-channel, retail-as-entertainment festival.

According to Gartner, 25% of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology across engagement channels by 2020, up from less than two percent in 2017.

Mobile has come to stay and has already moved past the desktop in many areas. This development will for sure continue in the next few years, which is why digital marketers need to find new ways to attract mobile users.

The opening line ‘ Three guys walk in to a bar…’ has fueled the material of comedians from Lenny Bruce to Jerry Lewis. For a surfer, a gamer and an engineer, it plays on our notions of stereotypes of beach bums, computer nerds and analytical types and we are waiting for a punch line that ridicules at least one if not all three.

Spoilers are everywhere. Remember that season’s finale episode that you’ve been planning to watch once you get home from work? Spoiled. Or that insanely good plot twist that was supposed to blow your mind? Yup, spoiled too. It doesn’t matter where you are or what time zone you are in. Chances are, someone from across the globe will not be able to contain their excitement and will drop the bomb on social media before that mind-blowing plot twist even had the chance to ‘surprise’ you first hand. It sucks, right?

Ever since our drawings of stick figures were hung up on the fridge at home, we’ve been telling the world what we want to be when we grow up. Even our dress-up toys (the little plastic stethoscope for a birthday present; fireman’s hat; the police badge) subtly beg the question: “What will you be when you grow up?” Yet, considering that many children at primary school today will end up in jobs that don’t even exist yet, the idea of ‘what I want to be when I grow up’ is more confusing than ever before.

In the simpler and less complex marketing world which we had just a few years ago, advertising was done according to the motto ‘the largest gathering of people has the greatest potential.’ It was all about reach and the interest of the individual fell by the wayside.

Operators need to take a holistic approach to their network and embrace the ‘power of and’ if they are to meet rising customer demand, improve scalability and reduce network complexity, Nokia’s president of Fixed Networks, Federico Guillén, said during a keynote conference session at Broadband World Forum. There is no single technology or access mode which will deliver ubiquitous ultrafast connectivity, he emphasized, instead a combination of technologies is required.